Happy Friday, y’all! Spring has sprung, flowers are blooming, the cherry blossoms are doing their thing in Washington, D.C., we all survived the solar eclipse, and the New York Rangers are about to clinch the best record in the whole damn NHL.
Life is good, eh? Oh sure, there are problems and worries everywhere, but on Fridays I like to come here and forget all that and think about good things.
Like courage and bravery, and the power of the human spirit. That’s what I thought of when I first heard about a 12-year-old girl named Yanka Stepanenko. Yana is Ukrainian, and of course as such she has been hugely impacted by the awful war that has now been going on for more than two years.
Stepanenko lost both her legs in a Russian missile attack on the railway station in Kramatorsk, Ukraine.
And yet on Monday, will run five kilometers of the Boston Marathon on prostheses.
According to this fundraiser page, “Yana’s charitable goal is to raise money for a sports prosthesis for a severely wounded defender, a patient of the NESZLAMNI Center, who lost a limb in the war. The girl wants him to be able to run like her.”
What a remarkable young woman. Here’s the link to her fundraiser. I hope she gets the biggest cheers of anyone in Boston on Monday.
**Next up, there was, of course, a solar eclipse this week, which freaked out lots of people (“Don’t look at it!”) but for most of us was just something fun to do on Monday afternoon for a few minutes.
Me and the boys went outside with our special glasses, looked up for 5 minutes, said “Wow” and “cool” a few times, then went about our lives.
This was pretty awesome, though; a view of how the eclipse looked from an airplane.
**And finally today, a pretty cool little sports moment. The transactions page of a sports section contains a million little stories every day; this player gets called up from the minors, this player gets released because of that, etc.
But rarely do you see a gesture like this: The Baltimore Orioles have a young phenom named Jackson Holliday, who is 20 years old, son of a former big leaguer, and one who seems destined to be the Next Big Thing.
Holliday was called up from the minors on Wednesday, and to make room for him on the roster, the Orioles released Tony Kemp.
This (above) was the message Kemp sent out upon hearing the news. All class, Tony.
He made a ton of fans with that Tweet. Have a great weekend.
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